Short-Week Training Plan

Mat Manual companion guide to "Two Hours a Week: Training on a Short Budget of Time." Print it. The article makes the honest case for a small budget. This plan spends it: week templates for the shapes real weeks come in, a monthly rotation that keeps every part of your art fed, a what-to-drop table for the hard weeks, solo menus that serve your classes, and a quarterly review that measures progress on the clock a short week actually runs on.

Name: ______________________________ Dojo/Gym: ______________________________ Art: ______________________________ Current grade: ______________ My weekly budget (hours, honestly): ______________ Template chosen (A / B / C, Part 5 to 7): ______________

BEFORE ANYTHING: ☐ This plan organizes training time. It does not raise your intensity ceiling, your contact level, or your clearance for live work. Those belong to your instructor and your art's normal gates, at any budget. ☐ Stop rules outrank templates. Sharp, one-spot, joint, or worsening pain, numbness, tingling, weakness, chest symptoms, or head or neck symptoms end the session and follow your school's and a professional's guidance, not this plan's schedule. ☐ Missed time is never repaid by doubling. A missed class is not made up with a harder next class, a marathon solo session, or extra live rounds. The plan resumes where it stopped (Part 8). ☐ Solo work in this plan is maintenance at light to moderate effort: slow technique, forms at easy pace, movement. No full-power striking at household objects, no throws or falls without mats and a partner, no new material learned from video in place of class. ☐ Tap early in any live work, at any budget. Control comes before any submission, throw, or finish, and a short week changes nothing about that order. ☐ Tell your instructor your budget before you run this plan (Part 3). A plan your instructor has not seen is a private guess about a shared activity.

Part 1: How to Use This Plan

This plan is for students whose honest weekly budget is around two hours, in any art, at any grade where the basics are already familiar. Beginners in their first months should run it with their instructor's direct guidance on template choice.

The Rules That Govern Every Week

Who Uses Which Template

Templates are chosen per training block (one quarter is a good unit), not per week. Switching weekly destroys the comparison the quarterly review depends on. Switch at a review, with a reason written down.

Part 2: The Budget Audit

Complete this before choosing a template. Audit the last four real weeks, not the next four imagined ones.

Reading the audit. Your budget is the typical week's minutes, minus the minutes usually lost, rounded down to the nearest template. A student who audits at 150 hopeful minutes and 105 real ones plans at Template A or C and banks the difference as resilience. Planning at the hopeful number is how short-week students end up feeling behind in a plan meant to end exactly that feeling.

The one-line budget. Write it as a sentence and put it on the log (Part 16): "My budget is ______ minutes a week: ______ in class and ______ solo, on ______ (days)." Every later part of this plan refers back to that sentence.

Part 3: The Instructor-Conversation Checklist

Have this conversation once, before your first planned block, and again at each quarterly review if the budget changes. Five minutes, in person, not during a drill.

Instructor's answers, written the same day: session to protect: ______________________________ This quarter's focus: ______________________________ Solo touch: ______________________________ Let slide: ______________________________ Year expectation: ______________________________

An instructor who answers the let-slide question carefully has given you the most valuable item on this page. Permission to drop the right things, from the person who will grade you, separates a short-week plan from a guilt cycle.

Part 4: The Protect List: Ranking Your Training Menu

Rank your art's menu once per block, with Part 3's answers in hand. The ranking decides every hard week in advance (Part 11).

The one-art default, stated as this plan's position. On a two-hour budget, rank 1 belongs to one art. A second art enters only by taking a rank honestly: usually the rank 4 strand for a block, maintained or tasted, not progressed in. Students whose goal is breadth may rank differently, and should write that goal on this page so the quarterly review judges the right thing.

My goal for this block, in one sentence: ____________________________________________________________

Part 5: Template A: Two Classes of 60 Minutes

The strongest default shape: two touches a week, the thread kept warm by spacing.

Minute map for each 60. Arrive changed and warm before the hour starts. First 10 of class: take the class as taught, with your focus held quietly in mind. Core block: full attention on the instructor's material; your focus is a lens, not a private lesson running inside the public one. Final block: note, mentally, the one correction aimed at anyone that also fits you. Two minutes after class: exit log (Part 13).

Template A failure mode. Treating session 2 as optional because session 1 went well. Session 2 is where session 1's material becomes yours; the audit usually shows this template failing by drift into Template B without the solo session that makes B work.

Part 6: Template B: One Class of 90 Minutes Plus 30 Solo Minutes

The one-evening shape: depth in class, and a scheduled solo session that bridges the seven-day gap.

The solo 30, mapped. Minutes 0 to 5: easy movement and base shapes. Minutes 5 to 20: the solo menu from Part 14, working the class's main material. Minutes 20 to 27: the rotation strand, at easy pace. Minutes 27 to 30: read the exit log, write the solo line, name next class's focus.

Template B failure mode. The solo session quietly becoming optional, leaving a seven-day gap the class then spends half of itself repairing. Guard it like the class: named day, named time, logged. A solo session missed twice in a block is a template problem, and the quarterly review should consider Template A or C.

Part 7: Template C: Two Classes of 45 Minutes

The short-session shape, common in schools running children's and adults' classes back to back, and in lunch-hour programs. Frequency is this template's wealth; depth must be manufactured by focus.

What 45 minutes cannot hold. A warm-up of your own invention, a long conditioning block, and two technical strands, all in one session. Let the school's class supply warm-up and conditioning in its own dose, and let the rotation (Part 9) supply the second strand in a different week rather than a crowded session.

Template C failure mode. Compensating for short sessions with frantic ones: everything at speed, nothing settled. The answer to short sessions is narrowness, not hurry. A 45-minute session that settles one technique honestly outperforms a breathless tour of four.

Part 8: The One-Hour Fallback and Broken Weeks

Weeks collapse: illness in the house, a work deadline, travel, a car that will not start. The fallback keeps the thread without pretending the week was normal.

The fallback week, in order of preference. One core class of any length, with its exit log, and nothing else required. If no class is possible: two solo minimums (Part 15) on separate days, at light effort, working the last class's material from the log. If even that fails: one solo minimum and the log entry written anyway, naming what happened. A logged empty week keeps the plan alive; an unlogged one invites the second empty week.

Return rules. The week after a fallback week is a normal planned week, not a catch-up week. No doubled sessions, no added intensity, no live rounds taken to feel back on schedule. If the gap was three weeks or longer, tell your instructor and consider running one lighter week at the template's shapes before resuming the rotation where it stopped.

The rotation resumes, it does not restart. Mark the fallback week in the rotation calendar (Part 9) as a hold. The next week takes the missed strand only if it was the month's rank 3 grade material; otherwise the rotation continues. Chasing missed strands turns a rotation into a debt ledger.

Part 9: The Monthly Rotation: Keeping Every Strand Fed

A short week cannot feed every strand of an art every week. It can feed every strand every month, on a published order, so that nothing starves long enough to become a rebuild.

Rotation rules. The class's actual teaching outranks the rotation's lens: if the school teaches groundwork in your core-technique week, the lens is how you attend, not a reason to skip. One strand leads per week; a week with two lead strands has none. The rotation repeats monthly, with strands adjusted at the quarterly review.

Part 10: Rotation Cards by Art Family

Use the row for your art to fill Part 9's strands with real content. Your instructor's syllabus names the specific material; these cards name the pattern.

Filling your card. Write your four strands here from your syllabus, in your instructor's terms: Core: ______________________________ Grade material: ______________________________ Secondary: ______________________________ Live/integration: ______________________________

Part 11: The What-to-Drop Decision Table

Decide drops now, while the week is theoretical. In a hard week you will drop things anyway; this table chooses them in advance, in the protect list's order (Part 4).

The guilt rule. A drop taken from this table is the plan working. It is recorded as "dropped per Part 11" and carries no debt into next week. Drops invented mid-week from guilt, usually involving a punishing make-up session, are the failure this table exists to prevent, and they break the opening block's no-doubling rule.

Part 12: Session Anatomy: Minute Maps

Whatever the template, a class session spends itself in the same order. The maps below are for your attention, not for redesigning your instructor's class: they tell a short-week student where their focus belongs as the session moves.

The 90-minute dividend. Template B's longer class earns its keep in the application phase, where partner work can settle. Spend the dividend there, not on extra conditioning at the end, which the budget cannot recover from.

Part 13: The Exit Log Standard

Three lines, written within ten minutes of the session ending, every session, in the log (Part 16) or wherever you will actually keep them.

Standards for the lines. Plain words, named techniques, no ratings of yourself as a person. "Bad session" is not a line 2; "guard dropped when tired, last two rounds" is. A missed line 3 means the solo session has no agenda, so line 3 is written even when you suspect the solo session will be missed; on the worst weeks, line 3 is the session.

Weekly harvest. At the week's end, read the week's lines together. The correction that appears twice becomes next week's focus sentence. Five minutes with the log is where a short week compounds.

Part 14: Solo Session Menus

Solo work serves the class work. Menus are chosen by what the last class taught and what line 3 named, never by what a video suggested this week. All menus run at light to moderate effort under the opening block's solo rules.

Menu A: Technique Touch (10 to 20 minutes). The class's main technique, slowly, a handful of honest reps, both sides where the art asks for both. Stop each set while the shape is still yours. Finish with two reps at class pace, no more.

Menu B: Form and Sequence (15 to 30 minutes). One form, throw-entry chain, or positional sequence, walked at easy pace. Stop at the place it broke down in class and walk that place three times slowly before continuing. One full run at the end, at training pace, only if the sections held.

Menu C: Movement and Base (10 to 15 minutes). Your art's base movement with nothing added: footwork patterns, stance changes, floor movement, shadow entries without completion. Breathing stays conversational throughout. This is the menu for tired weeks and the day after hard classes.

Menu D: Defense Review (10 to 15 minutes). Your art's core defensive shapes, slowly: covers, frames, escapes' first movements, falling shapes without falls where no mats exist. Defense starves on short budgets because classes reward attack; this menu feeds it in week 4 and whenever the log shows a defensive correction repeating.

Menu choice rule. The menu follows the rotation week (Part 9) when line 3 does not name one: week 1 A, week 2 B, week 3 the secondary strand's nearest menu, week 4 D or C. Two menus in one session is the ceiling, only in Template B's 30 minutes.

Part 15: The Between-Class Minimum

The minimum is the smallest unit of this plan and the one that holds it together: 10 to 20 minutes, once between classes (twice for Template C where possible), touching only what line 3 named.

Why so small, stated once. The minimum's job is memory, not fitness: it keeps the last class's correction warm until the next class can build on it. A minimum sized like a session competes with the classes for recovery and goodwill, and loses both contests by February. Ten honest minutes, fifty weeks a year, is over eight hours of targeted practice, aimed by your instructor's own corrections. That is the plan's engine room.

Part 16: Practice Log

One row per session, class or solo. Minutes are recorded as trained, not as planned; the gap between the two, across a quarter, is the audit the review reads.

Reading the rows. Attendance first: a quarter of attended sessions at honest minutes beats a quarter of planned ones. Strand balance second: count the month's strands against Part 9 and name the starved one. Exit lines third: their completion rate is this log's best predictor of whether next quarter improves.

Part 17: The Monthly Review Sheet

Complete on the same day each month, from the log, in fifteen minutes. Keep the sheets together for the quarterly review.

The one-adjustment rule. Each month changes one thing: a template detail, a solo slot, a strand's share. Two adjustments in a month cannot be told apart at the review, and a plan that cannot be read cannot be steered. Students who feel the plan needs three changes write all three down and promote one.

Part 18: The Quarterly Review Sheet

The quarter is this budget's natural unit of progress. Complete with three monthly sheets and the log in front of you, and bring it to the Part 3 conversation.

Judging progress here. Compare against last quarter's sheet, not against other students or a six-hour schedule's expectations. A good quarter is quiet: attendance held, one or two things clearly better, nothing starved into a rebuild.

Part 19: Plateau Protocols

Plateaus at this budget are expected and are handled by protocol, not by panic or by volume.

The never list for plateaus. Never answer a plateau by adding a second art in the same budget, doubling sessions for a fortnight, or buying a program the budget has no hours to run.

Part 20: Training Around Life Load

The budget competes with a life, and the plan prices that competition in advance.

Tell the people at home which evenings are class. Short-week students who brief their household keep their two hours.

Part 21: Testing and Event Weeks on a Short Budget

Gradings, seminars, and first competitions land differently on a short budget: the event can cost a week of training time and a week of recovery, a month's eighth part spent in one day.

The fortnight's shape. The week before: normal template, grade material as the lens (Part 9, week 2 pattern), hard live rounds finished by midweek. Event week: the event replaces the second session; the remaining session is light and technical. The week after: normal template at moderate effort, exit logs kept with care, since post-event weeks are where short-week students quietly stop attending.

Seminar honesty. A full-day seminar is a wonderful thing and costs roughly three weeks of this budget in load. Take it as the month's main event, drop the secondary strand that month by Part 11, and do not also grade that month if you have the choice.

Deciding which events. Rank events by the protect list: your own grading first, a seminar in your core strand second, everything else as the budget's surplus, which in most quarters is zero.

Part 22: Adding Time: Growing the Budget When Life Allows

Budgets grow the way they were built: honestly, one change at a time.

The growth rule. Add one element per quarter at most: a third short class, a second solo session, or thirty minutes added to a solo slot. Hold it for a full month before judging it, and judge by the log: attendance, next-morning notes, and whether the original sessions got worse.

Where growth goes first. The starved strand from the quarterly review, not the favorite strand. Growth spent on what already thrives produces the same starvation at a higher total cost.

Stepping back down. An addition that fails its month is removed without ceremony and the old template resumes. A budget that grew and shrank back has lost nothing; the log knows more about your real capacity than it did.

Part 23: Maintenance Mode: The Deliberate Season

Some seasons, the correct goal is to hold what you have: a new child, a hard job stretch, an illness in the family, a house move. Maintenance mode names that goal in advance so the season is run, not drifted through.

What maintenance protects. Skill decays slowly when touched weekly and quickly when abandoned for a season. A maintained season keeps the return cheap. Students who announce maintenance get paired and paced accordingly; students who vanish and reappear get a harder return.

Part 24: Fault Table: Short-Week Failure Modes

Work one fault at a time. Fault 9 manufactures several of the others, and fault 1 makes the plan feel like a broken promise when it was simply mispriced.

Part 25: Terms Used in This Plan

Part 26: Instructor Notes: Planning Inside a Student's Budget

Instructors: a student who hands you Part 3's checklist has done you a service, telling you the truth about their attendance before it becomes a mystery. These notes are the return half of that honesty.

Part 27: Agreements for the Short Week

Read and sign with a regular training partner, and share the schedule lines with your household. Short weeks survive on agreements made while calm.

Partner name: ______________________________ Date: ______________

Part 28: Final Review and Sign-Off

Complete at the end of each quarter, with the quarterly sheet (Part 18) attached or copied beside it.

Student signature: ______________________________ Date: ______________

Instructor signature: ______________________________ Date: ______________

Final line. Two hours a week, spent on purpose and written down, is a training life. Spend yours like it counts, because at this budget, measurably, it does.